You can tell how much I like you by examining the condition of my house when you arrive.
If I like you a lot, it’s a mess.
If I only like you a little, it’s only a little messy.
If I barely know you, it’s been cleaned up.
If I don’t like you, you never got an invitation to start with – unless you’re my neighbor and barged in anyway to complain about my kids. Which has never, ever happened. OK, yes it has. OK, OK. More than once.
If you’re one of my best friends, and insist on coming over whenever you darn well please, then you don’t mind the fact that there’s a basketball in the planter and you ignore the junk from Costco that won’t fit anywhere else, so it’s shoved under the breakfast bar.
You ignore the plastic bin of Christmas decorations stuck in the corner because they never quite got put back into the garage. At this point, why bother? Christmas is only three months away.
But I do have standards. Shut up. Yes, I do.
For example, I do not leave the Christmas tree up past Jan. 3. Or 5th. Or 26th. Feb. 14 is the absolute limit. And I make my son, Cheetah Boy, put it back in the garage, now that I’ve broken down and purchased a tree made from petroleum products.
I don’t leave food lying around, or empty dishes. I’m not a frat boy, I’m just a garden variety slob.
And I never leave things piled on chairs or the couch, because one of my biggest pet peeves is having to move a pile of magazines when I come to your house to visit. It’s exhausting and often dusty.
I enjoy having out-of-town houseguests, because it forces me to clean up my house for real, and do a bit of decluttering as well.
Unfortunately, my neat freak mother has passed away, so there’s no one to do a white glove test anymore, but it is useful, don’t you think, to have guests coming that force you to rethink your housekeeping?
Especially if your guests have no children, in which case they really won’t understand why the bathroom floor is decorated with crumpled towels, why there’s a carpet of dirty socks littering the living room floor, or how it is that Legos multiply underfoot overnight as they’re strewn around the house.
“Ouch!” is not the sound you want to hear when you get up in the morning, and find your houseguests trying to navigate the minefield that is your house.
Now, my house is fairly small, which is the way I like it, so I always know what my teenagers are up to. Even when I don’t want to know.
Let me ask you: If you have a big house, do you have entire rooms full of clutter? Does it get messier? Or do you just hire people to clean it up?
I’m afraid if I had a bigger house, I’d just have “junk rooms” where I’d throw everything I didn’t want to deal with and close the door.
Then, eventually, there would come that day of reckoning, when you have to open the door and everything would spring out like a jack-in-the-box.
Actually, that describes my garage, which was nicely organized once upon a time, but now looks like it survived Hurricane Wilma.
Luckily, no one has to see the garage, and I make sure it’s not available to guests.
Meanwhile, if you come to my house and it’s a mess, you know there’s love for you inside.
Contact the writer: mfisher@ocregister.com or 714-796-7994
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